People don't like Donald Trump.
There is no doubt. The man looks like a buffoon.
He is a reality television star.
He talks as if he knows everything.
He makes pronouncements like a drunk standup at a comedy club.
He is an embarrassment.
But he is not truly an idiot. He is a man of his time, of the media world, who knows how to communicate in soundbites.
He is a "Great Communicator", one who knows how to manipulate the confines of our LOL age.
He is well-aware of his buffoonish nature. He has a bitter of Shakespeare's Hal in him.
Truth is, he wouldn't be as successful as he is, if he were not able to buckle down and focus when the situation calls for it.
At a time like that, he ceases to be the buffoon.
A few years back, Trump was called to testify before Congress on the subject of the cost overruns on the reconstruction of the United Nations building.
His testimony was focused, intelligent, and concise, considering the massive amount of information and analytics he had to deal with in his testimony.
I came away convinced that Trump did not just get lucky in the business world. I also came away convinced that Trump knows how to work a room, any room. The man is a communicator, on whatever level he needs to communicate on at the time, for the specific purpose of a specific setting.
I am not predisposed to liking Trump. I do not like much of his politics. But I do like his anti-immigration stance, and his no-nonsense quality.
Oh, by the way, in his testimony, Trump noted that the cost they were projecting was $1.2 billion. Trump said he could do it for $750 million.
Trump PREDICTED that in three years, cost overruns by the company contracted would bring the project to $3 Billion.
Currently, it seems, the cost is at almost $2.6 Billion:
As of March 2014, the cost overrun was estimated at $370 million — a 19 per cent increase. Turning to the estimated final cost of the Plan, he noted its amount of $2.21 million and that 99.2 per cent of the estimated costs to completion had been expended and/or committed. Noting that the responsibilities for the post-renovation construction and close-out activities would be transferred from the Plan’s Office to the Office of Central Support Service, he sought assurances that Plan-related costs would be borne by that Office under the regular budget.
So Trump was right, even if a little off.
Read his testimony. Watch the video. Tell me what you think:
TESTIMONY OF DONALD J. TRUMP,\1\ CHAIRMAN AND PRESIDENT,
Mr. Trump. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Members of
the Subcommittee. It is a great honor to have been invited, and
if I can lend a hand, I would certainly love to do so.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Trump with attachments appears in
the appendix on page 315.
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I have to start by saying I am a big fan, a very big fan of
the United Nations and all it stands for. I cannot speak as to
what has been happening over the last number of years because
it certainly has not been good, but the concept of the United
Nations and the fact that the United Nations is in New York is
very important to me and very important to the world as far as
I am concerned. So I am a big fan, such a fan in fact that at
great expense I built a building across the street. It is the
tallest apartment house in the world. It has been a
tremendously successful building, sold out, and I am very proud
of it. And if the United Nations were not there, perhaps I
would not have built it in that location, so it means quite a
bit to me.
My involvement with the United Nations began with a letter,
which I will give to the Subcommittee, from the Ambassador to
the United Nations from Sweden, and it is a long letter and a
very beautifully written letter, and essentially he read an
article about the success of Trump World Tower, which is the
building that I can show you right here, which is, as you can
see, very substantially taller than the United Nations, bigger
than the United Nations. And he read an article in the New York
Times saying that the building cost approximately $300 million
to build.
So he wrote me a letter and ultimately called me and said,
``Is it possible that that building cost $300 million, because
it just seems so much bigger and so much better and so much
more expensive and so much more luxurious, and how could you
have done that for $300 million?'' When at that time, Senator,
they were talking about $1.5 billion to renovate the United
Nations and this was around December 2000. I said, well, there
are only two reasons, either gross incompetence or something
far worse than that, and you know what the something is, and
that is corruption, because there is absolutely no way that
that building could have cost $1.5 billion to build.
And I did a chart, and I looked at other buildings, and I
heard the numbers today. I am very impressed with Mr. Burnham,
but Mr. Burnham, it is not his business. Mr. Burnham is in a
different business. The man he hired who has done some work, I
guess, has just been on the payroll for 2 days, so perhaps he
will be a great genius and he will bring down the cost to what
it should be, which I think is about $700 million tops, and
that is complete.
But I did a little chart, and I looked at buildings that
were comparable that I built, and I looked at fees also,
architectural fees. The architectural fee for this building--
and you have to understand a residential luxury building is far
more complex than an open-floor office building to build. It is
much more. You have many more bathrooms, you have many more
kitchens, you have many more rooms. It is more complex. An
office building is essentially open space with subdividers.
So I looked at it and I added up some of my costs, and for
Trump World Tower, across the street, built not long ago, I
spent approximately $258 a foot. It is the tallest residential
building in the world, $258.32 a foot. I have 871,000 feet. It
cost $225 million to build.
Anybody that says that a building of renovation is more
expensive than building a new building does not know the
business ...
